Still life photography-food

Your task is to create a still life photograph on the subject of food. Compare your image to other's work.

Still life photography is the depiction of inanimate subject matter, most typically a small grouping of objects. Still life photography, more so than other types of photography, such as landscape or portraiture, gives the photographer more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition.

Here are a few examples of still life food photography that I found just from the internet, most of these images are very commercial based, mainly with clean and simple images lit evenly, serving a commercial advertisement purpose. 

I wanted to find some more art based photography, that fits with the brief of taking a still life food image whilst also fitting with a style that I find interesting and more challenging than the above.

Here are some images taken by Martin Parr, this style of still life food photography is very different from the style above. The image looks very unstaged in a dark room with Parr having used a flash, producing harsh shadowing on the image. I like the way the doughnut has been placed onto a menu or magazine type page, this gives it a fun childlike feel. It reminds me of an American dinner type area, whilst looking appealing this image doesn't look as professional as the images above. I like the fun aspect to this image and I like that it is different from traditional advertisement style image. 

...........Here I experimented with making an image in the style of Martin Parr. Although I have achieved a similar style of work to Parr it isn't a style that I particularly like or find interesting and challenging. 

I started to look else where for interesting still life photography, I came across Andy Grimshaw, whose work I find much more interesting. 

I started by looking at this image of fruit in yoghurt, taken by Grimshaw, although this work is still very staged with lighting and it looks like a very clean and simple image, similar to the work above which I said I didn't like, somehow this seems more my style and it is more interesting than the advertisement shots above. 

These three images are from a set of images, all of the same style, taken by Grimshaw. These are my favorite images on his website, I really like the dramatic lighting on the black background giving strong bold colours. Whilst being still life food images these images are interesting in themselves, they are exciting and eye catching. This is the style of image I want to produce.

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Spot the Difference

In this task we were asked to produce an image in the style of another photographer, this could be any photographer famous or not.

I started to think about what type of image I wanted to produce and thought about what I wanted in my images. I decided that I would like to create some fairy images but not fantasy, I wanted to create realistic fairy images.

When researching about 'fairy photographers' I found it very hard to obtain any information that wasn't to do with fantasy work. However I stumbled across the Cottingley Fairies which were the exact type of images I wanted to produce.

Cottingley Fairies 

The Cottingley fairies are found in a series of images (the first two being produced in 1917) produced by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley. The images were seen by the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Strand Magazine. Public reaction was mixed, some believed the images to be real, others declared that they were fake. In the early 1980's the girls admitted that the photographs were faked using cardboard cutouts of fairies, copied from a popular book at the time however the fifth and final photograph caused some arguments between the girls as Frances continued to clim that this one was real, both gils also argued over the fifth, as they both claimed that they took the image.

This is an example of one of the Cottingley fairy images. The model is dressed in a floaty top with flowers in her hair, this adds to fairy feel. The pose of the model leaning on her hand, she seems relaxed and not affected by the fairies dancing around in front of her. I like the graininess to the image, which gives it an aged quality. 




I started to think about producing a Cottingley Fairy image of my own. I chose a subject with long loosely curled hair, similar to that of the subjects in the original images. I chose to shoot the images on location in a grassed area copying the style of the original images. 

This is the image that I first produced after looking at the fairy images. I really like the pose of the model, looking down onto the fairy, she looks very relaxed and happy to be with the fairy. I chose to change the image to black and white, matching the style of the original image, I also added a higher grain to the image to give it aged feel. The only thing I don't like about the image is the lack of the detail in the fairy. I actually Stuck the image of the fairy onto a printed image of the background with the subject. I think this is one of my mistakes. I wold like to do a re-shoot of this image, printing out a cardboard version of the fairy, which the two young girls did,  which may help to make it appear more realistic and similar to the original Cottingley fairy images. I think it would also look better if the image was more contrasted looking similar to the original image.